(no subject)
Author: bookelfe
Title: Five Drinks
Recipient: kittu9
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Pinako Rockbell, Van Hohenheim, Urey Rockbell, Sara Rockbell, Trisha Elric, Winry Rockbell
Summary: Pinako's never wanted to stay the same forever.
1. 1871
“First drink's on me tonight,” Pinako hollered, and the rest of the bar cheered. She raised her mug and drained it in a single long motion, to whoops and applause; then she wiped her mouth off on her sleeve and shouted, “And the next five rounds after that are on you all, because I'm the one who's getting married in a month!”
Laughter filled the room. Alice Elric jumped up. “To Pinako!” she called out. “And to the rest of us old married biddies!” The women of Resembool roared and clanked their glasses together.
“To the Pantheress of Resembool!” A deeper voice; that was Javier, from Rush Valley. “And to all the men who can finally breathe easy because they're safe from her!”
“And to all the men who are crying tonight,” countered his wife Lucia, “because now they'll never get a chance!”
Pinako cackled harder at this than anybody else, banging her mug on the counter and almost splashing herself with beer in the process - someone had refilled it for her when she wasn't looking. And why shouldn't she laugh? She'd been more surprised than anybody to find herself wanting to get hitched, after all. Pinako Martin, married woman - it was about the funniest thing she'd ever heard. Or no, not Pinako Martin. Pinako Rockbell!
“Do I get to buy a round?”
She looked up, wiping tears of laughter away from her eyes, and grinned. Well, well! For once in his life, he'd showed up somewhere on time.
“Ha! You don't have a choice about it, Van Hohenheim.” Pinako slapped him on the back, and he grabbed the side of the counter as he wobbled dangerously on his stool. “You'll buy a round if you know what's good for you!”
Hohenheim righted himself, looking sheepish. “I thought we were going to be eternal bachelors together. What made you decide to tie the knot?”
“If I'm gonna keep an automail business open here,” said Pinako, “I'll need someone to keep house for me, right? Cook meals, watch the kids - I'm won't have time to be bothered with all that, now, will I?”
“Kids?” echoed Hohenheim, blinking at her under his glasses. “You want kids?”
“Sure! Why not?” It wasn't something she'd thought too much about, but anything seemed possible right here and now. Talking wary country folk into the still-new procedure of automail limb replacement - building a business from the ground up, with no safety net - marriage, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids even - why the hell not? She was the Pantheress of Resembool, wasn't she? Obstacles took one look at her and ran away crying! And it wasn't like she wasn't going to have help.
Hohenheim was still sitting there like a stunned sheep; she elbowed him. “Hey! Are you gonna order that round, or are you just gonna sit there? There's a whole lot of beer back there not being drunk.”
“Right! Sorry.” Hohenheim leaned over the counter for the bartender, and Pinako sat back and laughed some more. Eternal bachelors, huh? That might be fine for Van Hohenheim, but if you stayed any one thing for too long, it got boring. It was time to try something new - and she was pretty sure she was going to like being Pinako Rockbell.
2. 1878
“You go on out to the porch now,” Pinako told Urey, and stepped into the kitchen to pour herself the first drink of the night. The way today had been going, it might not be her last. “I'll be out in a moment.”
Urey nodded solemnly and marched out to the porch. Pinako took a moment to rest her forehead against the cool metal of the icebox and take a deep breath. Urey was a good kid, didn't make a fuss, but now that Jeanne said she couldn't watch him during the day anymore she didn't know what she was gonna do until school started up in the fall. Most of the time it was fine, but on the days she had a surgery to do and couldn't be disturbed -
Ah, well. She'd figure out something. She picked up her glass and headed out to the porch. “Long day today,” she told her son, who was doing something with a stick of charcoal.
Urey nodded solemnly, and carefully drew a set of fluffy wings onto something that vaguely resembled a puppy. “Anybody get any legs?”
“Nope,” said Pinako. She'd spent two hours trying to talk that stubborn fool Jack Elric into getting an upgrade on his automail arm, but he'd said the old one did him fine. Fine, hell! He'd gotten that thing ten years ago, practically first generation automail. The fingers couldn't move individually, and the whole thing seized up after two hours' hard use. A soldier couldn't afford that kind of lack of mobility. It was gonna get him killed someday. But he'd just kept telling her he wasn't going to go through the pain of surgery just so she could turn a profit on some fancy gear he didn't need. Ass! “Listen up, Urey,” she told her son. “If a mechanic tells you she's gonna give you a half-price discount just to get you to come in and have the damn surgery, you listen up and you have the surgery, you hear me?”
“Yup, Ma,” said Urey dutifully. He was still working seriously on his doodle. Maybe the puppy was a horse; there was someone riding it, anyway. The kid had pretty steady hands, for a five-year-old.
Pinako sighed, and took a gulp of her whiskey. “You want to get your ma her pipe, kiddo?”
Urey thought about this for a moment and said, “Ummmmm. No.” She glared at him.
“I don't wanna,” clarified Urey, “'cause I'm drawing, but I will anyway, 'cause you want me to.” He smiled at her, angelically, and pushed himself to his feet.
That got a cackle of laughter out of her. She was raising him to be honest, after all. “Thanks,” she said. “If you're still drawing and you want some juice in a little while, I'll go in and get it for you, that fair?” Hohenheim might have called that equivalent exchange, not that she'd seen him around in the past year or so. It was just as well, she supposed. If she started considering that fool as a potential reliable babysitter, she'd know she'd really gone beyond the bounds of reason.
Urey nodded, agreeing to the terms, and scrambled off to get her pipe from the living room. Her promise didn't cost her much; she was going to have to get up to go make dinner in a little while anyway. She'd never thought she was going to have to learn to cook, but after a few years of feeding herself and Urey she was starting to get half-decent at it. Another five or ten minutes, and she'd get up and start chopping vegetables for a fry-up - she'd have to make sure to double the portions so they could have it for lunch tomorrow. Then she'd have to figure out where she was going to stow Urey during that double hand surgery next week, since that one was probably going to take her all night. And she had letters to write, new supplies to order, patients to follow up with - and after all it might be time to start thinking about getting one of those new telephones now that they were running wires up through Resembool, though whether the money that would cost was worth the time and hand cramps it would save her -
Well! The world kept running, and you had to run on with it; if Jack Elric would learn that, he'd live a longer life. She could finish her whiskey first, though. She figured she deserved just about enough time for that.
3. 1897
Urey's girl ordered the first drink. Pinako and Trisha both eyed it. It glowed neon pink, and had a tiny umbrella in it. “What did you say that was called?” asked Trisha.
“A Desert Oasis!” Sara gleefully pulled the alcohol-soaked maraschino cherry off the end of the umbrella and popped it into her mouth. “It's got orange juice and cherry brandy and ginger beer and rum and a little grenadine,” she said, indistinctly, around the cherry. “Want to try?”
Trisha shook her head, but Pinako reached out for the glass and took a long gulp. She rolled the alcohol around on her tongue, and grinned. “Twenty years ago, you'd have called that an East City Screw.”
Trisha was watching her, with a large amount of interest. “You know, I don't think I've ever seen you drink anything but beer or whiskey.”
“Ha! You ever tried asking that old stick-in-the-mud at the Ram's Horn in Resembool for anything fancier than a gin and tonic?”
“It was the same in my hometown,” said Sara, and leaned over to grab her drink back from Pinako, without embarrassment. “Fancy drinks like this, they're a city thing, you know? So when we all went out for after our first class, I saw the list of cocktails up over the bar, and I thought, this city's not gonna beat me! I'm going to try every one of those drinks before I graduate.”
Pinako cocked her head. “And did you?”
Sara's eyes widened. “Of course! When I say I'm going to do something, I do it.” She reached into her pocket, whipped out a much-creased piece of paper, unfolded it, and laid it down on the table. As Pinako squinted at it, it resolved into a detailed chart written in pencil. “There, see?” announced Sara, and gestured proudly down at the chart. “I've crossed off everything I've tried, there's the column for notes, and that section there is for cocktails I found out I can make cheaply at home and the ingredients I'll need for them! You can't always be drinking out in these Central bars when you're doing med school on a budget.”
There was a pause. Trisha, Pinako saw, was biting her lip to keep from laughing.
You had to admit it showed a kind of logical mind. “Well,” said Pinako, “pass me over that chart, I'll see if there's anything on there I haven't tried.” She raised her hand, signaling to the bartender to head their way. “Trisha, what're you having? Remember, I'm buying tonight.”
Trisha smiled. “Just a hard cider for me, please.”
Pinako snorted. “You came all the way to Central to have a hard cider?”
“I like hard cider,” said Trisha cheerfully, and added a polite “Thank you!” to the bartender as he slid a bottle down the counter her way.
Sara laughed, and lifted her glass. “To knowing what you want,” she said, “and going after it.” The two women toasted, grinning conspiratorially at each other, and Pinako realized had the sudden strange thought that they were grown-ups, the both of them - her son's girl and the girl she'd half-raised, grown-ups. She'd known Trisha Elric since practically before she was born. A whole generation had gone by, and Pinako had barely noticed.
She smiled, and leaned back in her chair to peruse the drink chart, with its firm opinions on Briggs Breezes and Slow Transmutations written down in Sara's neat hand. If those kids were grown-ups now, she thought, with some satisfaction, then she could drink all she liked tonight, and they could be responsible for getting her home.
4. 1908
Over the first drink, she found herself glaring at the empty seat across the table. Over the second, she said it outright: “Where the hell are you, Van Hohenheim?”
It felt strange to be resentful about it. Hohenheim was Hohenheim; if he turned up at the right time once in his long life, that was all he was ever going to do. Trisha had known that when she picked him all those years ago.
And it wasn't as if Pinako didn't know what he'd say, if he were here: if you live on, you see people die. Losing people is the toll that you pay for a long life. It's a kind of equivalent exchange. Well, that wasn't news to her. It had been a long time now since Hohenheim could tell her much that she didn't know.
Thing was, if he'd been sitting across from her to say that out loud, blinking through those silly vanity glasses of his, then she could have shouted back at him. That was what she wanted, she decided. Not really to get drunk, but to shout at someone. Could have gotten all those maudlin cliches out of her system - “I shouldn't have to do this alone, again,” or “parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.” 'Supposed to' - as if anything in this world had ever worked like it was supposed to. She knew that, too. Nobody had to tell her that.
But damn it, when this kind of thing happened, you shouldn't have to deliver your own sage advice to yourself. You wanted to rant about unfairness, and curse the military, and the country, and your own fool children for going off to get themselves killed and your own fool self for letting them. You needed someone else to fill in the platitudes for you, and then you could curse them too.
No matter how long she sat here, though, Hohenheim wasn't going to turn up. He was a good drinking partner, but he'd never been a person you wanted to rely on.
And what that meant that she was going to finish her whiskey and get up, no matter how little she wanted to. She was going to go home, and pay the babysitter, and make sure three parentless children didn't keep themselves up all night crying again. There wasn't anybody else to do it, and that meant her.
You did what you had to do. You kept going. And when there wasn't anyone to rely on, you went back to relying on yourself. That was another toll that you paid, for living a long life.
5. 1921
“You're on your fourth already, Granny!” protested Winry. She snatched the beer bottle out of Pinako's hand and grinned across the kitchen table. “This one is for me.”
Pinako snorted, and grabbed it back. “When you don't have to worry about getting woken up in the middle of the night by any screaming infants, you can drink as much as you want, too.”
“That's not going to be for a while,” said Winry, ruefully.
Pinako laughed, and took an appreciative swig from her bottle. Despite what she'd said, she thought this was going to be her last; it was getting late, and she got tired these days a lot earlier than she used to. “Don't say I didn't warn you, my girl.”
“It's supposed to be Ed's turn to take care of it half the time,” grumbled Winry, “but he sleeps so soundly I've gotta get up and shake him before he even starts to stir, so I'm waking up anyway.” She stole the bottle back from Pinako, and took a gulp. “You want to remind me why I married him?”
“You tell me,” said Pinako.
Winry laughed. “If I'm gonna keep up with the competition in Rush Valley, I'll need someone to keep house for me, won't I?”
“That's right,” agreed Pinako, ignoring the pang of memory with ease. Everything reminded her of something else these days, it seemed. It didn't do to pay too much attention; nothing was ever exactly the same twice. She put two hands on the table. “Those two boys certainly are taking a long time out there, aren't they?”
“Ed said he wanted to make sure that bastard spent a lot of time with his grandson, now that he couldn't run away anymore.”
Pinako snorted. She could imagine it easily: Ed with the baby sling around his front, ranting at his father's grave with that special kind of spluttering that only Edward Elric could ever manage. Ed had never quite forgiven Hohenheim for going off and dying before Ed had the full chance to unload all his resentment. But that was Hohenheim for you. He was almost never where you wanted him to be. “Well,” she said, “sorry for not staying up with you, but I think this old girl's got to get to bed. You'll be all right waiting up by yourself, won't you?”
Winry laughed. “I'll be fine. I don't get much time to myself these days. I'll enjoy it.” She set down the bottle again, and came around the table to give Pinako a hand in getting to her feet. Pinako wouldn't have asked for the assistance, but to be honest, she didn't mind it this time. That last beer, she admitted, in the privacy of her own mind, might have been a mistake.
But that was fine; she'd spent fifty years being responsible for her own mistakes. She could let her granddaughter help her up the stairs this once.
And if the Pinako of fifty years ago would have given her hell for it, that was fine, too. What kind of fool wanted to stay the same forever?
Title: Five Drinks
Recipient: kittu9
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Pinako Rockbell, Van Hohenheim, Urey Rockbell, Sara Rockbell, Trisha Elric, Winry Rockbell
Summary: Pinako's never wanted to stay the same forever.
1. 1871
“First drink's on me tonight,” Pinako hollered, and the rest of the bar cheered. She raised her mug and drained it in a single long motion, to whoops and applause; then she wiped her mouth off on her sleeve and shouted, “And the next five rounds after that are on you all, because I'm the one who's getting married in a month!”
Laughter filled the room. Alice Elric jumped up. “To Pinako!” she called out. “And to the rest of us old married biddies!” The women of Resembool roared and clanked their glasses together.
“To the Pantheress of Resembool!” A deeper voice; that was Javier, from Rush Valley. “And to all the men who can finally breathe easy because they're safe from her!”
“And to all the men who are crying tonight,” countered his wife Lucia, “because now they'll never get a chance!”
Pinako cackled harder at this than anybody else, banging her mug on the counter and almost splashing herself with beer in the process - someone had refilled it for her when she wasn't looking. And why shouldn't she laugh? She'd been more surprised than anybody to find herself wanting to get hitched, after all. Pinako Martin, married woman - it was about the funniest thing she'd ever heard. Or no, not Pinako Martin. Pinako Rockbell!
“Do I get to buy a round?”
She looked up, wiping tears of laughter away from her eyes, and grinned. Well, well! For once in his life, he'd showed up somewhere on time.
“Ha! You don't have a choice about it, Van Hohenheim.” Pinako slapped him on the back, and he grabbed the side of the counter as he wobbled dangerously on his stool. “You'll buy a round if you know what's good for you!”
Hohenheim righted himself, looking sheepish. “I thought we were going to be eternal bachelors together. What made you decide to tie the knot?”
“If I'm gonna keep an automail business open here,” said Pinako, “I'll need someone to keep house for me, right? Cook meals, watch the kids - I'm won't have time to be bothered with all that, now, will I?”
“Kids?” echoed Hohenheim, blinking at her under his glasses. “You want kids?”
“Sure! Why not?” It wasn't something she'd thought too much about, but anything seemed possible right here and now. Talking wary country folk into the still-new procedure of automail limb replacement - building a business from the ground up, with no safety net - marriage, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids even - why the hell not? She was the Pantheress of Resembool, wasn't she? Obstacles took one look at her and ran away crying! And it wasn't like she wasn't going to have help.
Hohenheim was still sitting there like a stunned sheep; she elbowed him. “Hey! Are you gonna order that round, or are you just gonna sit there? There's a whole lot of beer back there not being drunk.”
“Right! Sorry.” Hohenheim leaned over the counter for the bartender, and Pinako sat back and laughed some more. Eternal bachelors, huh? That might be fine for Van Hohenheim, but if you stayed any one thing for too long, it got boring. It was time to try something new - and she was pretty sure she was going to like being Pinako Rockbell.
2. 1878
“You go on out to the porch now,” Pinako told Urey, and stepped into the kitchen to pour herself the first drink of the night. The way today had been going, it might not be her last. “I'll be out in a moment.”
Urey nodded solemnly and marched out to the porch. Pinako took a moment to rest her forehead against the cool metal of the icebox and take a deep breath. Urey was a good kid, didn't make a fuss, but now that Jeanne said she couldn't watch him during the day anymore she didn't know what she was gonna do until school started up in the fall. Most of the time it was fine, but on the days she had a surgery to do and couldn't be disturbed -
Ah, well. She'd figure out something. She picked up her glass and headed out to the porch. “Long day today,” she told her son, who was doing something with a stick of charcoal.
Urey nodded solemnly, and carefully drew a set of fluffy wings onto something that vaguely resembled a puppy. “Anybody get any legs?”
“Nope,” said Pinako. She'd spent two hours trying to talk that stubborn fool Jack Elric into getting an upgrade on his automail arm, but he'd said the old one did him fine. Fine, hell! He'd gotten that thing ten years ago, practically first generation automail. The fingers couldn't move individually, and the whole thing seized up after two hours' hard use. A soldier couldn't afford that kind of lack of mobility. It was gonna get him killed someday. But he'd just kept telling her he wasn't going to go through the pain of surgery just so she could turn a profit on some fancy gear he didn't need. Ass! “Listen up, Urey,” she told her son. “If a mechanic tells you she's gonna give you a half-price discount just to get you to come in and have the damn surgery, you listen up and you have the surgery, you hear me?”
“Yup, Ma,” said Urey dutifully. He was still working seriously on his doodle. Maybe the puppy was a horse; there was someone riding it, anyway. The kid had pretty steady hands, for a five-year-old.
Pinako sighed, and took a gulp of her whiskey. “You want to get your ma her pipe, kiddo?”
Urey thought about this for a moment and said, “Ummmmm. No.” She glared at him.
“I don't wanna,” clarified Urey, “'cause I'm drawing, but I will anyway, 'cause you want me to.” He smiled at her, angelically, and pushed himself to his feet.
That got a cackle of laughter out of her. She was raising him to be honest, after all. “Thanks,” she said. “If you're still drawing and you want some juice in a little while, I'll go in and get it for you, that fair?” Hohenheim might have called that equivalent exchange, not that she'd seen him around in the past year or so. It was just as well, she supposed. If she started considering that fool as a potential reliable babysitter, she'd know she'd really gone beyond the bounds of reason.
Urey nodded, agreeing to the terms, and scrambled off to get her pipe from the living room. Her promise didn't cost her much; she was going to have to get up to go make dinner in a little while anyway. She'd never thought she was going to have to learn to cook, but after a few years of feeding herself and Urey she was starting to get half-decent at it. Another five or ten minutes, and she'd get up and start chopping vegetables for a fry-up - she'd have to make sure to double the portions so they could have it for lunch tomorrow. Then she'd have to figure out where she was going to stow Urey during that double hand surgery next week, since that one was probably going to take her all night. And she had letters to write, new supplies to order, patients to follow up with - and after all it might be time to start thinking about getting one of those new telephones now that they were running wires up through Resembool, though whether the money that would cost was worth the time and hand cramps it would save her -
Well! The world kept running, and you had to run on with it; if Jack Elric would learn that, he'd live a longer life. She could finish her whiskey first, though. She figured she deserved just about enough time for that.
3. 1897
Urey's girl ordered the first drink. Pinako and Trisha both eyed it. It glowed neon pink, and had a tiny umbrella in it. “What did you say that was called?” asked Trisha.
“A Desert Oasis!” Sara gleefully pulled the alcohol-soaked maraschino cherry off the end of the umbrella and popped it into her mouth. “It's got orange juice and cherry brandy and ginger beer and rum and a little grenadine,” she said, indistinctly, around the cherry. “Want to try?”
Trisha shook her head, but Pinako reached out for the glass and took a long gulp. She rolled the alcohol around on her tongue, and grinned. “Twenty years ago, you'd have called that an East City Screw.”
Trisha was watching her, with a large amount of interest. “You know, I don't think I've ever seen you drink anything but beer or whiskey.”
“Ha! You ever tried asking that old stick-in-the-mud at the Ram's Horn in Resembool for anything fancier than a gin and tonic?”
“It was the same in my hometown,” said Sara, and leaned over to grab her drink back from Pinako, without embarrassment. “Fancy drinks like this, they're a city thing, you know? So when we all went out for after our first class, I saw the list of cocktails up over the bar, and I thought, this city's not gonna beat me! I'm going to try every one of those drinks before I graduate.”
Pinako cocked her head. “And did you?”
Sara's eyes widened. “Of course! When I say I'm going to do something, I do it.” She reached into her pocket, whipped out a much-creased piece of paper, unfolded it, and laid it down on the table. As Pinako squinted at it, it resolved into a detailed chart written in pencil. “There, see?” announced Sara, and gestured proudly down at the chart. “I've crossed off everything I've tried, there's the column for notes, and that section there is for cocktails I found out I can make cheaply at home and the ingredients I'll need for them! You can't always be drinking out in these Central bars when you're doing med school on a budget.”
There was a pause. Trisha, Pinako saw, was biting her lip to keep from laughing.
You had to admit it showed a kind of logical mind. “Well,” said Pinako, “pass me over that chart, I'll see if there's anything on there I haven't tried.” She raised her hand, signaling to the bartender to head their way. “Trisha, what're you having? Remember, I'm buying tonight.”
Trisha smiled. “Just a hard cider for me, please.”
Pinako snorted. “You came all the way to Central to have a hard cider?”
“I like hard cider,” said Trisha cheerfully, and added a polite “Thank you!” to the bartender as he slid a bottle down the counter her way.
Sara laughed, and lifted her glass. “To knowing what you want,” she said, “and going after it.” The two women toasted, grinning conspiratorially at each other, and Pinako realized had the sudden strange thought that they were grown-ups, the both of them - her son's girl and the girl she'd half-raised, grown-ups. She'd known Trisha Elric since practically before she was born. A whole generation had gone by, and Pinako had barely noticed.
She smiled, and leaned back in her chair to peruse the drink chart, with its firm opinions on Briggs Breezes and Slow Transmutations written down in Sara's neat hand. If those kids were grown-ups now, she thought, with some satisfaction, then she could drink all she liked tonight, and they could be responsible for getting her home.
4. 1908
Over the first drink, she found herself glaring at the empty seat across the table. Over the second, she said it outright: “Where the hell are you, Van Hohenheim?”
It felt strange to be resentful about it. Hohenheim was Hohenheim; if he turned up at the right time once in his long life, that was all he was ever going to do. Trisha had known that when she picked him all those years ago.
And it wasn't as if Pinako didn't know what he'd say, if he were here: if you live on, you see people die. Losing people is the toll that you pay for a long life. It's a kind of equivalent exchange. Well, that wasn't news to her. It had been a long time now since Hohenheim could tell her much that she didn't know.
Thing was, if he'd been sitting across from her to say that out loud, blinking through those silly vanity glasses of his, then she could have shouted back at him. That was what she wanted, she decided. Not really to get drunk, but to shout at someone. Could have gotten all those maudlin cliches out of her system - “I shouldn't have to do this alone, again,” or “parents aren't supposed to outlive their children.” 'Supposed to' - as if anything in this world had ever worked like it was supposed to. She knew that, too. Nobody had to tell her that.
But damn it, when this kind of thing happened, you shouldn't have to deliver your own sage advice to yourself. You wanted to rant about unfairness, and curse the military, and the country, and your own fool children for going off to get themselves killed and your own fool self for letting them. You needed someone else to fill in the platitudes for you, and then you could curse them too.
No matter how long she sat here, though, Hohenheim wasn't going to turn up. He was a good drinking partner, but he'd never been a person you wanted to rely on.
And what that meant that she was going to finish her whiskey and get up, no matter how little she wanted to. She was going to go home, and pay the babysitter, and make sure three parentless children didn't keep themselves up all night crying again. There wasn't anybody else to do it, and that meant her.
You did what you had to do. You kept going. And when there wasn't anyone to rely on, you went back to relying on yourself. That was another toll that you paid, for living a long life.
5. 1921
“You're on your fourth already, Granny!” protested Winry. She snatched the beer bottle out of Pinako's hand and grinned across the kitchen table. “This one is for me.”
Pinako snorted, and grabbed it back. “When you don't have to worry about getting woken up in the middle of the night by any screaming infants, you can drink as much as you want, too.”
“That's not going to be for a while,” said Winry, ruefully.
Pinako laughed, and took an appreciative swig from her bottle. Despite what she'd said, she thought this was going to be her last; it was getting late, and she got tired these days a lot earlier than she used to. “Don't say I didn't warn you, my girl.”
“It's supposed to be Ed's turn to take care of it half the time,” grumbled Winry, “but he sleeps so soundly I've gotta get up and shake him before he even starts to stir, so I'm waking up anyway.” She stole the bottle back from Pinako, and took a gulp. “You want to remind me why I married him?”
“You tell me,” said Pinako.
Winry laughed. “If I'm gonna keep up with the competition in Rush Valley, I'll need someone to keep house for me, won't I?”
“That's right,” agreed Pinako, ignoring the pang of memory with ease. Everything reminded her of something else these days, it seemed. It didn't do to pay too much attention; nothing was ever exactly the same twice. She put two hands on the table. “Those two boys certainly are taking a long time out there, aren't they?”
“Ed said he wanted to make sure that bastard spent a lot of time with his grandson, now that he couldn't run away anymore.”
Pinako snorted. She could imagine it easily: Ed with the baby sling around his front, ranting at his father's grave with that special kind of spluttering that only Edward Elric could ever manage. Ed had never quite forgiven Hohenheim for going off and dying before Ed had the full chance to unload all his resentment. But that was Hohenheim for you. He was almost never where you wanted him to be. “Well,” she said, “sorry for not staying up with you, but I think this old girl's got to get to bed. You'll be all right waiting up by yourself, won't you?”
Winry laughed. “I'll be fine. I don't get much time to myself these days. I'll enjoy it.” She set down the bottle again, and came around the table to give Pinako a hand in getting to her feet. Pinako wouldn't have asked for the assistance, but to be honest, she didn't mind it this time. That last beer, she admitted, in the privacy of her own mind, might have been a mistake.
But that was fine; she'd spent fifty years being responsible for her own mistakes. She could let her granddaughter help her up the stairs this once.
And if the Pinako of fifty years ago would have given her hell for it, that was fine, too. What kind of fool wanted to stay the same forever?